It is difficult to add up the exact seconds that were lost when Marlen Reusser suffered a mechanical that required a bike change in the closing kilometres of the team time trial mixed relay, but her teammate Stefan Küng was sure that it was the moment the race was lost at the UCI Road World Championships in Kigali, Rwanda.
Switzerland finished in third, 10 seconds behind the gold medalists from Australia.
"It's very unfortunate, Marlen didn't want to put it in numbers, but I am pretty sure the title was lost there, but with ifs and what ifs, we would have been world champions more times already," said Küng while sitting next to his teammates Reusser along with Jan Christen, Mauro Schmid, Jasmin Liechti and Noemi Rüegg in front of the assembled media at the Kigali Convention Centre on Wednesday..
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"It's part of the sport, it's part of the game, and we are happy for the others. They deserve it, and we did the best we could today."
Australia won the gold medal for the second consecutive year, covering the 41.8km course with the fastest combined time of 54:30. The men's team included Michael Matthews, Luke Plapp and Jay Vine, and the women's team Amanda Spratt, Brodie Chapman and Felicity Wilson-Haffenden.
The French team of Bruno Armirail, Paul Seixas, Pavel Sivakov, Cedrine Kerbaol, Juliette Labous, and Maeve Squiban earned the silver medal, finishing five seconds behind the Australians.
It was a close race between the top three teams, and while Australia had the fastest time through the first three checkpoints, Switzerland were the fastest through the fourth checkpoint.
TV footage of the time trial then panned to Reusser, who had dismounted her bike and was standing at the side of the road waiting for a bike change, her two teammates riding away in the distance.
Although it wasn't immediately clear what had happened to her bike, Reusser, who had won the world title in the individual time trial on Sunday, explained that her derailleur was not shifting properly as they approached the final cobbled climb, Côte de Kimihurura.
"My derailleur didn't work anymore, and I couldn't shift." Asked what she was thinking about during the moments of her mechanical, she said, "My thoughts were like 'fuck.'"
Probably the most surprising turn of events occurred when the TV footage panned back to Reusser, and while everyone watched, expecting her to be chasing, she had already caught up to her teammates and was setting the pace at the front on the cobbled climb, Rüegg struggling to stay on her wheel.
"We planned this yesterday and we said, 'You two go and then I go myself and then we catch up and then you two go', it was a masterclass," Reusser joked with the press.
"No, it was not [a masterclass] and I think it's hard to judge in this moment what to do, make right decisions, and now afterwards we can discuss and be super smart, but sometimes it's more about making experiences and later you are always super smart, so we are for sure going to discuss it and find better solutions, be annoyed and blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was good, maybe it was not so good, I don't know."
While Küng was confident they would have won the world title, to add to their victories in Wollongong in 2022 and in Glasgow in 2023, Reusser said it was impossible to determine the time loss or to know if they would have won without her mechanical.
"Everyone asks me how much time we lost, but guys, I don't know. Stefan says we would have won. I think it's up to the super smart people to come up with this [calculation]; you need time to change the bike, you need time to catch back up, and you lose energy that you would have if you did not do all of this, and you would be faster, so I cannot summarise. We were not happy, of course," she said.
The time is taken on the second rider in this event, and so while Reusser managed to rejoin her teammates on the climb, Rüegg also had the gruelling task of staying on her wheel all the way across the finish line.
"The first time I saw her again was on the cobbled climb, and I was on her wheel, and I suffered and only saw stars," Rüegg said. "It was an unfortunate situation, but respect to Marlen for how strong she is came back, and we did the best we could in the situation."
At the time of Reusser's mechanical, Küng said it felt like he, along with Christen and Schmid, was suffering with them, and that it wasn't easy to watch from the sidelines while the race unfolded for their teammates on the road.
"We knew they were on a good ride, and then the next images are of them [Marlen] stopping at the side of the road. Obviously, we suffer with them, not physically, but at that point, we want to give her a push or have a direct line to the car that says, 'Stop the other two girls' or whatever," he said.
"It's different when you are sitting on a chair and they are in the heat of the moment, and it's hard to make the right call. Jan always kept believing, saying, 'yeah, it's still possible, it's still possible,' and then you see the next time splits and the teams coming through, and they had already lost some time, then you see it fading away, but in the end it was very close."
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